04/12/2012

Although I’m sure that this wasn’t in the minds of the people behind the Google Art Project (GAP),it may turn out to be quite a useful tool for connoisseurs. For one thing it makes a lot of obscure pictures visible, some of which I have never encountered as a Poussin scholar; so GAP throws up opportunities for considering, and in some cases re-considering some connoisseurial problems in Poussin. It also highlights some of the problems in using reproductions to judge colour and style, a huge topic which I can’t do justice to here. Maybe another post sometime?

The main reason for this post is that out of the 36 high-resolution in the Poussin archive of the GAP, a few trouble me. I hasten to add this isn’t a criticism of GAP whose resolutions are immensely useful to professional art historians like myself, which allow us to “drill” down to the detail of a picture. At the same time I’m a Poussin scholar and I feel duty-bound to highlight certain difficult pictures to anyone using the tool.

Capitoline Museum, Rome.

Capitoline Museum, Rome.

Here is one that has to be rejected, no doubt about it. The Camillus and the Schoolmaster of the Falerii. looks like an eighteenth-century pastiche of a famous Poussin subject known through several versions- see below. Camillus the Roman general punishes a schoolmaster who sought to betray his pupils by offering them as hostages; Camillus is indignant at this perfidy and has the miscreant stripped naked and beaten back to the Falerii by his charges. I’ve never seen this version before- and now unfortunately I have. I have no idea why the Capitoline have labelled this picture- here seen in situ- a Poussin. Like many of his paintings of the late 1630s, Poussin creates a firm, relief-like picture that usually unfolds from left to right. The colours, the poses, especially the foppish gait of Camillus have absolutely nothing to do with Poussin, or indeed the 1630s. Instead of thrashing the disgraced schoolmaster out of the village, the children seem to be leading him out to a picnic.Compare this with one of Poussin’s stern versions shown here.

I should advise the Capitoline to look for their painter in early 18th century France, a rococo painter with classical pretensions- but no means of putting them into practice. Let us not look but pass on.

Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.

Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.

Then there are paintings that have always been problematic. An excellent example of this is a painting at Toledo, a mythological or poetic work which traditionally provoked debate until everybody lost interest in the work. Nobody can even agree on what the subject is, let alone who painted it. Is it “Dido and Aeneas”, “Mars and Venus”, or “Rinaldo and Armida”? It’s on GAP as “Mars and Venus”, though there’s no conclusive proof that it is that subject. Checking Christopher Wright’s 1984 catalogue raisonné, he says that it fits neatly into Poussin’s development and places it in the late 1630s, though traditionally it’s been dated to the early 1630s or even 1624. Leaving dating aside for the moment, let’s consider what we have here.

Mars and Venus, or Dido and Aeneas, or Rinaldo and Armida, Toledo Museum of Art, c. 1638-9 (?), oil on canvas, 158 x 190 cm, right-hand side autograph, left-hand side over painted?

We have a painting that may be 60-70% by one of three other painters, and 30% by Poussin himself. This view might not be as bizarre as it sounds: three famous Poussin scholars (Blunt, Thuillier and Wild) attributed the work to three different painters, and Wright says that the museum, (presumably hedging its bets) attributes it to three other painters- and Poussin. There’s no discussion of that on the GAP entry, nor on the museum’s website, though more information, or links to more information might come in time. The entry reads:

“In a lush landscape, Venus, Roman goddess of love and beauty, is attended by her handmaidens, the Three Graces, while Mars, the god of war, stands enraptured by the sight. The figures are inspired by Nicolas Poussin's study of ancient classical sculpture. He derived his theme from classical literature, combining the Toilet of Venus, in which Venus makes her morning preparations while gazing into a mirror, with Mars "disarmed" or "unmanned" by Venus—a symbol of love's power to vanquish war. To illustrate this idea, Poussin shows Mars's weapons and helmet cast aside, while he holds his shield to serve as Venus's mirror. Its oval with her reflected image ingeniously links the two principles and marks the change in pictorial key from the quiet, coolly lit group of women composed in profile-like relief sculpture to the warmer tones of Mars's shadowed figure and the flickering movement and lighting of the two cupids. The landscape sustains this shift, the stately trees and constricted foreground opening out to a spacious vista toward snowcapped mountains. By the time he painted Mars and Venus, Poussin had lived some ten years in Rome since arriving there from France in 1624. Rome was to be his permanent home. Poussin's clients were cultivated men who shared his intellectual interests and valued the harmony he achieved between poetic content and rigorous clarity in his paintings of mythological and religious subjects. Poussin absorbed ideas from many sources, including the monuments of antiquity and the work of Renaissance painters Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Titian. But from the force of Poussin's artistic personality and his astonishing ability to invent solutions appropriate to each subject's mood came an artistic language, both incisive and sensuous, that broke new ground.”

Well, let’s assume it is “Mars and Venus” for the moment, though it seems an iconographic mishmash for Poussin, completely unlike his usual clarity in dealing with subject matter. The male figure and putto look Poussinesque, but they don’t seem that well-painted. And then there’s the landscape whose colours don’t seem typical of Poussin: that deep indigo seems uncharacteristic of his palette. At the same time I should stress that I’ve never actually seen this picture, as it’s seldom exhibited because of doubts over the authorship, and I’m having to study reproductions. It was exhibited in 1960 and here is a newspaper article recording its passage to Paris in that year! The river god in the water, if that’s what he is, seems summarily painted, though I will concede that the pose is found in other of Poussin’s works. The ground seems to be showing through in large parts of the painting, though they might to be due to paint loss- a technical report might help here. For the purposes of balance I’m going to quote Christopher’s Wright’s comments on the picture:

“It is difficult to see why there should have been such a conflict over the status of this picture. As Four painters are currently involved and each one advanced by a distinguished specialist there is reasonable certainty that at least three of them are wrong (Blunt initially accepted the picture in 1960, but re-assigned it to the “Hovingham Master” in 1966; Thuillier said it had been painted by Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy; finally, Wild rejected it and gave it to Poussin’s friend, Jacques Stella). In considering the old attribution to Poussin the picture fits quite easily into the artist’s development in the later 1630s (on stylistic grounds, this makes sense to me, but only the right-hand side) and the whole of the right hand side of the composition is close to the Toronto Venus Presenting Arms to Aeneas. The problems arise with the treatment of the naked figures on the left which seem far too realistic and even anecdotal for Poussin. Careful examination of the picture reveals that they may well have undergone some later “improvements”. It is hoped that a cleaning of the picture will establish this hypothesis (I do not know the condition of this picture nor have I seen a technical report on it, so it’s impossible to prove or refute this. Has the picture been cleaned since Wright made his observations?). (Wright, no. 94, 183)

Earlier in his catalogue Wrights has this to say:

“The Toledo picture has been subject to many doubts. It was originally thought to be one of Poussin’s early surviving pictures, then because it did not seem to fit into the artist’s early development, it was rejected altogether by many authorities. The right hand half of the picture clearly fits into the style familiar from the mid 1630s (no argument there). It is not dissimilar in treatment to the work in Toronto. The problem arises for the grouping of four nude female figures on the left which seem both in drawing and composition to be quite unlike Poussin. It is just possible that they may have been re-painted at a later date and it is hoped that a future cleaning of the painting will resolve the problems.! (Wright, 60-1)

As Wright says, the real problem is the left-hand group of three women who seem entirely untypical of Poussin. The strange and infelicitous admixture of large hips, small breasts and thinly tapered legs seems to indicate a different hand here. I would say that look mannered as well as realistic. Also, the kneeling woman is a direct quotation from a Crouching Venus, and Poussin doesn’t make his antique quotations so conspicuous; nor to my knowledge does he use that source in his art. So, if more than half isn’t stylistically typical of Poussin- though Wright still doesn’t reject it- then I’d be uncomfortable giving it totally to Poussin. I can see why Wright is happy to see it as a Poussin, but that left-hand female group is so at variance with Poussin that I can’t comfortably accept it as autograph. On the other hand I can’t completely reject, as parts of it seem consistent with Poussin. What a dilemma!

In his catalogue, Wright reproduces it next to the Pan and Syrinx (Dresden) and you can immediately see what Blunt called a “blonde” colour that is typical of of a group of pictures in the late 1630s. In Wright’s catalogue, the colour of the Toledo painting is closer to this “blonde” group, not the GAP colours, including that horrible blue. Sorry, my scanner is broken so I can’t put up an image of the reproduction in Wright, but within this group fall pictures like the St Rita of Cascia (Dulwich), St Margaret (Turin), Pan and Syrinx (Dresden), Venus and Aeneas (Toronto), Rinaldo and Armida (Bode Museum, Berlin). Maybe this case highlights the danger of using reproductions, especially digital to make assessments about art, though there’s a tradition of using them in connoisseurship. Here’s an excellent article that explores the topic of colour in museum photographs and the problems when using them.

If I compare the Toledo canvas with the Pan and Syrinx, I might accept a tentative attribution, though that depends on working from Wright’s reproduction. If the museum colour is right, then the picture would not fit into the late 1630s, and indeed we should put it back to the early 1630s, when works with similar colours were done. However, the problem remains of certain figures and motifs in the Toledo picture consistent with autograph works from that period.

I’m still deeply troubled by the non-Poussin elements in the Toledo canvas, and of course there is the colour problem, which is going to be difficult to resolve without me actually seeing the painting. Some of my Poussin colleagues have written about the Toledo painting assuming it is totally autograph, but I couldn’t until I’d satisfied myself about these doubts. I have e.mailed the museum with my concerns, but so far no answer. It would be good to hear from them in order to see if Wright’s hypothesis held water, which I think it might.

Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, Dulwich, London.

Then there’s an interesting cluster of paintings at Dulwich. Firstly, a canvas of putti or children playing, which I vaguely know about. “Putti in a Landscape” has been labelled “17th Century French”, though it’s still in the Poussin section. This has a bearing on the last problem because if Blunt saw a Poussin picture with non-Poussin elements, then he would invent another master to explain that incongruity. Not that he needed to as there are lots of candidates for copyists after Poussin’s Bacchic children, but Blunt memorably invented one painter called the “Master of the Clumsy Children.” Then there were painters in Rome like Podesta who is known to have copied Poussin’s bacchanals of children; still more enigmatic artists like the aforementioned “Hovingham Master” who’s crossed my path from time to time. I don’t know who painted the Dulwich putti, but this cannot be attributed to Poussin: the putti are badly drawn, no anatomical realism at all.

There’s a mysterious canvas called “Landscape” which could mean anything. It has figures lounging in leafy groves or strolling through the landscape, which you find in the artist’s work in the 1640s, but that kind of landscape was much imitated. The artists’ brother-in-law, Gaspar Dughet might be a better candidate than Nicolas himself. This vague landscape is in even worse condition, unable to penetrate beneath the layers of dirt and possibly over painting, but not by the master.

Lastly, there’s a kind of Bacchic family group consisting of satyr, nymph and putti, very common in Poussin’s oeuvre. This picture is a deplorable condition, and if you zoom in you can see the craquelure and dirt, and god knows what else. But even though this hasn’t been restored, I think there’s no doubt we’re dealing with an imitator of Poussin’s Bacchic groups here. All these three were in the Bourgeois bequest, but they’ve hardly attracted much interest, hardly surprising given their woeful state.

Albertina, Vienna

There are only two Poussin drawings on GAP, one of which I know is autograph as I’ve inspected it closely on the study table at Windsor. The other of a broken silver birch tree, or two trees, in the Albertina, perturbs me, though I have to say I haven’t seen the sheet itself. There are crude transitions between different densities of the wash; form isn’t modelled well, and frankly the application of the wash isn’t typical of Poussin. It appeared in an exhibition of 1984 curated by the late Konrad Oberhuber who actually used to work at the Albertina until he moved to the USA. As Oberhuber notes in that catalogue, it was rejected from the early 1960s onwards, given to Gaspar Dughet. Only Wild supported the attribution to Poussin in 1980, and Oberhuber was emboldened by this to present it as a Poussin drawing of around 1630. The trouble is his argument depends on comparing it to a whole cluster of drawings which manifestly aren't by NP. Who’s it by? Well, we could maybe accept Gaspar, but it might be too early for him; Jean Frangois Millet (possibly); Jean Lemaire, who would be working with Poussin at this time. There is also the appropriately named “Silver Birch Master” a landscape painter invented by Blunt in 1950. It used to be thought that a painting in the National Gallery, a Landscape with A Cowherd, was by the SBM, but Blunt changed his mind and re-attributed to the young Gaspar in 1980. Although there have been attempts to move it back to Poussin, it has stayed with his brother-in-law, which makes perfect sense to me. The attribution also helps to elucidate the Vienna drawing because the treatment of the trees in the London painting are similar. So I think both drawing and painting are the work of the young Gaspar Dughet.

Maybe all this highlights the need for professional art historians and specialists to consult with the GAP on issues of attribution and connoisseurship, though overall it’s thumbs up for a very useful resource.

11/15/2011

A bit more on Georges La Tour. As a correspondent to Art History News points out:, if you want to see La Tour in this country, you have go to Hampton Court (St Jerome Reading), Leicester Art Gallery (The Choirboy, A Young Singer), or Preston Hall Museum, Stockton on Tees, (The Dice Players). Remember there are none of his works in the National Gallery.

I had the privilege of seeing all three, along with loans from Fort Worth and Dublin in a small exhibition, Georges de La Tour: Master of Candlelight, held at Compton Verney in 2007.

The curator of the exhibition, and the U.K.’s leading expert on La Tour, Christopher Wright, pulled no punches when commenting on La Tour’s omission from the canons of taste.

“At no point in his long career did [Kenneth] Clark see fit to bring La Tour into the structure of his criticism and art history. Had La Tour been included in his Civilisation, the artist would, at a stroke, have been brought to the attention of a much wider public”.

As I said in the previous La Tour post, Anthony Blunt was very keen for the NG to acquire a La Tour. This, as Wright indicates, was that despite having a solid preference for Nicolas Poussin, Blunt was not blind to the rest of the 17th century French school; Clark, however, had absolutely no interest in French 17th century painting at all.

A large blind spot for the director of one of the world’s leading museums!

Source

Christopher Wright, “The Genius of La Tour: a lesson in the history of taste” in exhibition cat, Georges de La Tour: Master of Candlelight, Compton Verney, 2007, 33-38.

10/31/2011

Reading Art History News and the Tribune de l'Art posts about the Louvre's acquisition of a painter, hitherto unrepresented in that museum, Jean Le Clerc, got me thinking about a glaring 17th century French omission in our own National Gallery. This is a painter who may have influenced Le Clerc, Georges de La Tour. Though the gallery has a good collection of the French school, Poussin, Claude, Mignard, Le Sueur, the Le Nain, Champaigne, Vouet, it doesn’t posses a La Tour, though it had the chance when one was offered to the gallery for a low price under Kenneth Clark’s directorship. However, Clark with typical patrician scorn dismissed La Tour’s wonderful Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop as too vulgar, even when Anthony Blunt and an influential aristocrat tried to sway Clark. It isn’t always the acquisition budget that counts in these matters.

If you’re wondering what museum now has possession of the rejected La Tour- given to it in 1948….Take a wild guess!

Most people find it very hard to love Poussin. Most of the students I teach admit no love for Poussin at all. If I had a fiver for every time I’ve heard that Poussin is cold, passionless, academic etc, well you get my gist. Jones had much the same reaction, then. “But for a long time he left me cold. I knew it was my problem, not his. What I needed – it turned out, base creature that I am, is this painting. It finally encouraged me to see the passion of Poussin – and set me free to wander among the monuments of his profound art.

Rather than reproduce the National Gallery’s Nymph and Satyrs, which Jones is choosing to love to death, I’m putting up a similar paining that I’ve always liked: the master’s Pan and Syrinx, painted about 1637, and now in Dresden. Anthony Blunt said that this belonged to the “blonde” group of Poussin’s pictures, those that have this coppery, yellowish colour which is very attractive to look at. There are also other erotically charged works with this tonality like this one recently cleaned. The subject is both erudite and erotic. Syrinx was a chaste nymph who was pursued by the amorous Pan. To evade him she ran to the river and was turned into hollow water reeds that made a memorable sound when the frustrated god blew across them. From the reeds Pan created the first panpipe.

The picture was probably commissioned by one of Poussin’s patrons in Paris, maybe one interested in both musical theory and the erotic dimension of the myth? That’s the thing about Poussin: you have passion and intellectual content in the same package. Now with this laughable emulation of Poussin’s Pan and Syrinx by the 18th century rococo painter J.F. Troy, I’m wiling to bet that whoever commissioned this was solely interested in the sex rather than the learning. But with Poussin you can have both, although perhaps it takes some time for the former to register with the viewer.

Congratulations to Mr Jones for being successfully seduced by Poussin; let’s hope it is a long and lasting affair. As for myself, I still retain a passion for Poussin. It’s just Poussin studies that I’m not so enamoured of these days. That’s definitely needs a kiss- the kiss of life!

09/28/2009

The Independent reports on the revelation that a hitherto regarded fake at the Courtauld Institute, has turned out to be a genuine masterpiece. The painting, The Procuress- above- is now thought to be a work from the 17thcentury. It entered the Courtauld just after the war as a registered fake, a copy thought to have been produced by one of the most infamous of forgers- Hans van Meegeren. The Dutch forger went in for imitations of Vermeer with a dash of Caravaggio, most notably the forger's Supper at Emmaus of 1937. The fusion of different styles was one of the factors that led to van Meegeren's downfall. You just couldn't have blatant Caravaggesque effects in Vermeer's art. Another reason may have been HVM's figures looked nothing like HVM, the master. The fact that they shared the same initials may inspired van Meegeren to become a Vermeer forger.

The Courtauld now believe that this "fake" Procuress may even have hung in Vermeer's own house. A similar painting by Dirk van Barburen of the School of Utrecht, can be seen in our National Gallery's- A Woman Seated at the Virginal, of 1671. That may be so, but it's ridiculous to say this once fake work was actually painted by the Master of Delft himself as one journalist has reported. The expert opinion is that it is an anonymous artist of the 17thcentury, although wether it's actually by van Barburen himself remains a matter of speculation.

The Independent has this on the history of the painting:

The painting was presented to the Courtauld by Professor Geoffrey Webb, a specialist on historic architecture. He had been a senior arts officer in Germany just after the Second World War, and apparently received it in the Netherlands as a gift for helping with the restitution of works of art. He believed it was a Van Meegeren fake which had been recovered by the Dutch authorities in 1945 from the forger's villa in Nice. When Anthony Blunt, the then-director of the Courtauld, accepted The Procuress, few questions were asked. A few suspicious queries raised in the 1970s by the Dutch scholar Marijke van den Brandhofwere not followed up, as all appeared convinced it was a product of the forger. It was later lent to three exhibitions on fakes as a fine example of a forgery. Two other versions of The Procuress were thought to be the original until now. The first was owned by the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, but in 1949 another emerged from an English private collection. It was auctioned at Christie's before being bought by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

I'm vastly amused by the fact that a real masterpiece was lent to exhibitions as an example of a fake; but what makes me smile much more is the mention of Blunt. What I find funny is that the Procuress hung on the Courtauld's walls during Blunt's directorship- a real artwork which was deemed fake. But in Blunt's flat above the Courtauld, a painting by Poussin- now known to be fake- hung over Blunt's mantelpiece regarded by the director, who was convinced it was real.

09/25/2009

I recently learned that a former Louvre restorer, Regina Pinto Moreira, got more than she bargained for when she decided to clean the grime off Poussin's Hymenaios Disguised as a Woman During an Offering to Priapus, dating from about 1635. Beneath the layers of dirt she disclosed a phallus painted on Priapus. The offending article had been painted out by nervous, and censorious Spaniards in the 18th century. Our curator told a Sao Paulo newspaper- the town where the museum that owns the picture is located- that “post-production modesty” came into play when the Poussin was in the collection of the Spanish royal family. And the cost of re- exposing this offending member? The removal of the over-painting and dirt cost 150,000 Euros or $213, 000.

Reading this, I’m reminded of how much Poussin’s body is played down in the literature on the artist- the art historical equivalent of painting over the true, earthy, corporeal Poussin, I guess.Take the Nymph and Satyr of 1627,in the National Gallery, London. Many might see it as a purely mythological scene devoid of any lasciviousness or lust, but it’s quite obvious what the voyeuristic satyr is doing behind the tree. Interestingly HumphreyWine says in the NG catalogue of 17th French Painting that the eroticism in the picture didn’t stop an attribution to Poussin, though the painting’s exposure to the public was delayed on matters of decency.Apparently, some Georgian bigwig made a fuss about obscenity and morals, hence the picture’s delay in being showed to the public. It can’t have bothered the original owner of the painting though, HolwellCarr, who was actually a clergyman!

All this reminds me that the great Poussin expert Anthony Blunt could never really reconcile Poussin’s painting brain with the vulgar functions of his body. All Poussin scholars know the story of Blunt's reluctance to quote a, literally, scatological piece of prose in Poussin’s letters attacking a patron, during his lectures at the Courtauld. Still, Poussin was all flesh and bone, not an isolated brain floating free of his body. And as for sex in Poussin. Well, Poussin caught syphilis, the dreaded French disease with the result that his motor functions were severely impaired and his drawing hand became shaky.

I’m tempted to say that despite attempts to de-sexualize Poussin, this subject sticks out a mile.